Queer Studies 101: Gay Marriage is a Civil Rights Issue

On November 3rd, the state of Maine voted no on the issue of gay marriage in a referendum that was widely considered a test case for the rest of the nation. This vote was so important, Californians who successfully organized in support of Proposition 8, and thus outlawed gay marriage on the west coast, moved east. Groups dedicated to the defeat of gay marriage set up camp in Maine to deny consenting adults the right to legally wed. (www.miamiherald.com, story 1299203) Now is the time for African Americans to support Gay Marriage. This LGBT struggle is a civil rights issue; yet, in the Black community, we have failed to advance this cause. Indeed, too often we have advocated against it.

This summer, the national office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) called to task one of its own, Rev Eric P Lee, president of the organization’s Los Angeles chapter, for opposing California’s Proposition 8. Lee’s support of love and marriage should have been applauded by the venerable Civil Rights organization. SCLC’s unwillingness to surge forward in support of gay marriage was backwards. This Civil Rights organization was on the wrong side of this debate, the wrong side of history, and, ironically, on the wrong side of the Civil Rights Struggle.
(www.blackchristiannews.com)

Old school organizations like SCLC risk extinction with these regressive policies. They will be as derided by history for their outright silencing of LGBT Rights. Standing in the way of gay marriage today is as viciously ugly as George Wallace was when he stood in the schoolhouse door 40 years ago. (www.npr.org, story 1294680) More so. For how could any Civil Rights organization turn its back on a people struggling to express their full humanity?

During slavery, we Black folk expressed our humanity in our tears and smiles and the caresses we shared despite the overseer’s lash. And in our desire to marry, the brooms we jumped, leaped over into what we could claim as Love. Despite the law.

During Reconstruction, our ancestors stood for hours, sometimes days, to legalize their marriages. In her powerful discourse on the Black female experience, When and Where I Enter, writer Paula Giddings documents the legions of newly-freed couples who circled the Freedmen’s Bureaus in long lines to obtain a certificate of marriage from the state. (www.answers.com, paula-giddings) To publicly express their commitment. To love. What a wonderful way to celebrate Emancipation.

I am certain great scholarship equal to Giddings’ important work will document the determined, similar efforts of gay and lesbian couples to legally wed. Who are we, Americans, to deny them that basic civil right? How could we, Black Americans, deny them that basic civil right? The right to hold your loved one’s hand in the hospital. To commit assets to your loved one. The right to walk down the street holding hands. How could we, knowing how far our ancestors walked, all over the south and into the north and out west and up into Canada to find and hold loved ones, how could we now, the descendants of that transgressive, liberating Black love, deny our gay and lesbian brethren and sistren the same?

Because their love is unholy, ungodly? Didn’t slave-owners use the same Book to justify their silencing of Black emotion?

Because it’s nasty, disgusting to think about LGBT love? Weren’t slaves labeled nasty, disgusting, unable to love?

So many of us simply figure: ‘I don’t care what they do; I just don’t want to know about it.’

OK. But that increases life in the closet, on the DL, streaking into the night to find same sex love before returning home, to the bed of a Black woman. It increases risky behavior. Wouldn’t Black women, the fastest-growing group of HIV-AIDS infected Americans, be safer knowing? (www.cdc.gov, factsheets, aa) Wouldn’t our communities be stronger, healthier, if down-low husbands and boyfriends could simply be, openly, proudly gay?

When my friend, a beautiful brother, came out of the closet to me several years ago, he said he thought he would still marry a woman and father children one day. “So, you’re bisexual then?” I asked. “No,” he answered. He said he was just “doing what he was doing” while he was young and single. It took years for him to be able to exclusively date men, come out fully, self-identify as a gay man, and reject the false image of hetero-normative marriage that for so long had compelled him to deny his basic self and, foolishly, think he would be able to live as a straight man. Before our conversation, he had been in a few relationships with women that had lasted for years. Though he was finally able to name and claim his sexual orientation, think of all that time everyone lost because he was silenced into the closet too many of us in the Black community force our LGBT family and friends to occupy.

Many also point to the fact that the gay white male is more powerful than the heterosexual African American of either gender, as the LGBT community can pass as straight while most African Americans can not pass as white. But, for our LGBT sisters and brothers, like my friend, who are Black, who are our families, who are ourselves, “This business of passing is dangerous.”

At the start of the 20th century, Nella Larsen began to hint at the psychological damage done by sexual orientation passing in her novels Quicksand and, especially, Passing. (www.glbtq.com, african american lesbian literature) Now, at the start of the 21st, we need to probe deeper, into our own souls, into our own communities, into our own bedrooms. Into our own Truths. Into our own selves.

While Americans nosy in their neighbors’ bedrooms as if they have a right to be there, LGBT folk are attacked on the streets. (www.nypost.com, video shows brutal attack) The more pressing issue isn’t whether people should experience homosexual love; the pressing issue is that same sex lovers do experience violent hate. That experience in the public realm, of hate crimes and bias attacks and verbal assaults and death, is what needs to be policed. The experiences folk have in the private realm, of loving one another, needs to be left alone. Equal protection and privacy: that’s what people deserve, simply because they exist.